The iconography of conflict often outlasts battles and the lives of those who fight them. In the American south, confederate flags still fly, even though the government they represent was defeated 142 years ago. In Britain the poppy has grown in significance as a sign of remembrance, even as the number of first world war survivors has fallen to single figures. And in Northern Ireland the outbreak of peace has done nothing to diminish the status of visual symbols of the Troubles. Murals are still being painted and banners carried.

But their purpose is shifting. Images from Northern Ireland's conflict, though it is barely over, now claim to assert cultural identity; to be no more threatening than Morris dancing is in England. "Sharp uniforms, painted banners, flute, drum and bagpipe playing from award-winning bands ... create a colourful kaleidoscope for the senses," Tourism Ireland promises on its website about an event described this summer as "Orangefest 2007" but until now better known as the marching season, with all its associated strife and disorder. The murals of Belfast and Derry have attracted tourists for at least a decade, but the shock seeing of bombs, balaclavas and Armalite rifles painted on the ends of ordinary terrace houses on the Falls Road and the Shankill is giving way to a new surprise at more pacific artwork remembering George Best or the sinking of the Belfast-built Titanic.

At their best these murals reflect real change. The People's Gallery, inaugurated this summer and painted by three artists along Rossville Street in the heart of the Bogside, records the Troubles in the form of images that once helped perpetuate them. The 11 murals are a striking and skilled collection: among them the Runner, a boy fleeing CS gas, and the Petrol Bomber, a masked man shown in 1969. Though they record violence and suffering, they do so without much bitterness. That is true, too, of new non-sectarian murals painted jointly in Belfast by Danny Devenny, a former republican prisoner, and Mark Ervine, a loyalist. Now, as the Guardian reports today, they plan to paint Beatles album covers on walls in Liverpool.

Should the iconography of Northern Ireland be classified alongside Beatlemania? Not yet. There is a danger of a less palatable nostalgia for battles: a nostalgia that should be put aside. The Orange Order's commemoration of 17th-century conflict fed 20th-century feuds. A small province consisting of two groups, if both remain intent on expressing their differences through imagery, will find peace harder to achieve. Murals and marches are evolving. But it is too soon to be certain that they celebrate the end of conflict rather than sustain the threat of its return.